This invention relates to digital signal processors, and more particularly to digital signal processors for multi-level global accumulation.
Digital signal processing is concerned with the representation of signals in digital form and the transformation or processing of such signal representation using numerical computation. Digital signal processing is a core technology for many of today""s high technology products in fields such as wireless communications, networking, and multimedia. One reason for the prevalence of digital signal processing technology has been the development of low cost, powerful digital signal processors (DSPs) that provide reliable computing capability to implement these products cheaply and efficiently. Since the development of the first DSPs in the early 1980""s, DSP architecture and design has evolved to the point where even sophisticated real-time processing of video-rate sequences can be performed.
DSPs are typically generic and not optimized for a specific application such as video processing. When increased performance is necessary, a DSP may be paired with an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that is designed for a particular purpose. For example, a DSP in a video processing system may have an accompanying ASIC to accelerate the video processing functions. Although ASICs are effective at increasing the performance of different systems, the cost of an ASIC may be quite high. Further, because an ASIC is designed for a particular purpose, a circuit containing ASICs is generally not flexible in performing non-ASIC related tasks.